


Cranachan

by LunaCatriona



Series: The Abandoned Parties [2]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Cooking, Hogmanay, New Year's Eve, New Year's Party, Scottish New Year, Series 3, Still Game references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 22:13:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: She's abandoned her husband's New Year party in favour of Still Game, whisky, cider, junk food, Hogmanay Live and cranachan.Rated for the usual language.





	Cranachan

**Author's Note:**

> The Still Game thing is the Hogmanay special from 2006. They sometimes rerun it on BBC Scotland at Hogmanay.

It was on New Year’s Eve that she thought about that Christmas party.

She knew what that man was like. Fucking hell, she endured what he was like every day at work. And yet, she had ended up asleep in a housekeeping cupboard with him. And, she remembered with an uncertain jolt, he had kissed her. Even worse, she had kissed him back. No amount of alcohol could take full responsibility for that. No, that was all on them.

She hadn’t told her husband about that, and he hadn’t told her about his own antics. When some of it got back to her through the wives of his friends, she was rather startled to find that not only had she expected him to cheat on her, but that it didn’t bother her all that much. After all, she herself had indulged in an extramarital kiss, if not with the man she would ever have expected. Even less expected was the realisation that she didn’t regret that kiss one bit. Not when she had learned so much about a man who let her make rather negative assumptions about who he was. Though he was outwardly abhorrent, a real man lurked just beneath the surface.

She didn’t know why she did it. She stepped out of the New Year’s party she had been dragged to with her husband and dialled a number on her phone.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Malcolm,” she breathed. She didn’t actually know what she had planned to say if he answered, because she had anticipated that he would ignore her.

“Nic’la,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Why does something have to be wrong?”

“Because when Cabinet ministers phone me at half nine at night, there tends to be a fuck up of epic proportions.”

“I just…” she trailed away. Why had she called him? “What are you doing tonight?”

“Sitting here watching BBC Scotland, waiting for Chewin’ the Fat and Still Game to come on.”

“Homesick?”

“A bit,” he admitted. It never ceased to surprise her when he confessed to his own humanity. “What are you doing?”

“I’m out with James. Sober. Watching him get fucking hammered while he oozes all over his best mate’s wife.”

“Oh, that sounds like fun.”

“It’s about as much fun as a dying squirrel,” she retorted, though she knew he was being sarcastic.

He paused for a moment while she kicked the gravel outside the hotel pub she had been whisked away to. “Come over to mine.”

“What?”

“I’ve got more food than I can eat, more alcohol than I can drink and…” he hesitated.

“And?”

“And I could fucking use the company, okay?” he finished, that defensive aggression springing up into his tone of voice once more. “Come on. I can enjoy the vacant expression when you watch BBC Scotland.”

She considered it, but how was she supposed to tell her husband that she was going to spend New Year’s Eve with another man? “I don’t know. What will I say to James?” she asked.

“Ah, tell him to fuck off. He’s a cunt.”

“Say what you think, why don’t you?” she shot back at him.

“What? You said he was doing fucking drugs and probably cheating on you at his Christmas party. He’s a cunt.”

“I don’t think I have the moral high ground on the cheating front.”

“One fucking drunken Christmas kiss does not equal what you know he’s probably been up to. And he probably does it habitually,” he reminded her. It was the first either of them had spoken of that. She had rather thought – or maybe hoped – he had been plastered enough not to remember it. “Nicola. Come over. Leave him to shit in his own nest.”

She sighed. She would rather be sitting in front of a television with someone remarkable than stuck watching her thoroughly unremarkable husband make a fool of both them and their marriage. “Fine. Fine. Text me your address. I’ll tell him I’m going to see a friend.”

“Okay.” She was amazed to hear the smile in his voice.

She hung up and went back into that building in which she was trapped with her husband and his drunken friends. Truth be told, she had been struggling ever since it started filling up. It was provoking her anxiety and the claustrophobia, because she knew that getting out was not without effort. When she found her husband, she put a hand on his shoulder to catch his attention from the wife of a friend who wasn’t paying enough attention. “Listen, James, this place is setting me off. I’m going to a friend’s for a while, okay?”

He barely acknowledged that she had spoken to him. She had almost hoped he would ask questions, or even care where she was going. She realised with a rush of embarrassment that she was only there for appearances’ sake. So, she fought her way out of that hotel and she got into her car, planning the route to the address she had been sent.

As she drove, she wondered how she could have ever thought her husband gave enough of a damn to stop her leaving him to it. She had done what he wanted – shown her face, made small talk, charmed his friends…she had played the part. She had served her purpose. And now he didn’t care what she did.

She drove down the street she had been instructed towards, looking out for number seventy-two. When she found it, she parked the car, and knocked on his door. He answered it within seconds. His smile was nearly scary, but it was genuine. For the first time in her memory, he was nothing but happy to see her. “Come in,” he said. “Ditch the death traps,” he added, nodding down towards her feet.

With a grin, she kicked off her silver heels and followed him to his living room. On the coffee table there was a box of shortbread, whisky, cider, a bottle of Irn Bru, Mackie’s crisps, and boxes and packets of sweets and biscuits she had never seen before. “Christ,” she half-laughed. “You really are homesick.”

He shot her a glare, like he was warning her not to go there. However, as at the Christmas party, her curiosity got the better of her.

“How did you get all this, anyway? I’ve never even seen half of it.”

“My sister sent down a big box of Scottish junk food for my Christmas,” he told her. He didn’t sit down, but headed to the kitchen, where he took a bottle of cider out of the fridge, opened it and handed it to her. “I was actually thinking about making cranachan. We always had cranachan on Hogmanay when I was a kid. Not that you’re supposed to give your ten-year-old son and five-year-old daughter whisky, of course,” he added with a smirk.

“And you wonder why we think Scotland is just a giant pub with a population of five million alcoholics,” she grinned.

He allowed her a smile before he pulled out cream and raspberries from the fridge. “Get me the porridge oats and the honey,” he told her. “Cupboard above your head.” She opened the cupboard and pulled down what he had asked for. He put a pan on the heat and said to her, “Can you be trusted to whip cream or will I have to fucking redecorate?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes and snatched the tub of cream from his hands. “Would you rather I spilt some cream or burned myself on that?” she retorted, pointing at the pan. His response was to hand her a bowl and an electric whisk.

And, to her irritation, as soon as the whisk hit the cream, it splashed all up her chest and face. “Fuck!” she shouted.

“I fucking knew it,” he laughed. “Biggest fucking disaster on two legs, you are.” He took the pan of toasted oats off the heat and soaked some kitchen roll in water. He started wiping cream from her collar bone, his touch gentle against her skin. “Fuck me,” he chuckled. “Look at the fucking state of ye!”

She tried not to focus on the way his fingers brushed so softly against her neck, or the way his eyes locked with hers when he wiped her lips and nose. She did her utmost not to let him get to her. He probably wasn’t even trying to get to her. But she had never known a touch so tender that elicited such an intense reaction in her. It was a fight not to let that reaction, those tinglings of electricity where his fingers touched her skin, be known.

He went into the utensils drawer and gave her a normal whisk. “Manual labour is safer,” he said, shaking his head as he returned to his pan.

It was harder work, and it was the proof she was out of condition when her shoulder and arm started to ache. Eventually, the cream was whipped, and he folded honey, the toasted oats, raspberries and rather a large quantity of whisky into it. He spooned it into glasses and sent her back to the television.

“How did you even get BBC Scotland on the TV?” she called to him.

He sat down beside her and gave her a glass of whatever the fuck he just made. “You can get it through the Sky box,” he said. As he spoke, something called ‘Still Game’ was starting and, when he saw the title of the episode, he burst out laughing before anyone even spoke. “This is the special from a couple years back. Fucking hell, you’re gonna hate this!” he said gleefully.

She frowned at him; when the first scene started, she wasn’t at all surprised to find she didn’t actually fully understand what they said, but she got the gist of what was going on. When they got in the lift, she found a sense of foreboding every time she watched someone get in a lift. It was validated when one of the characters – Winston, she thought his name was – exclaimed, “That big balloon’s broke the lift!”

She put her face away from the screen, not wanting to see her worst fear realised. “You invited a claustrophobe round to watch a fucking lift fail. And you call me a fucking retard?” she bit at him.

“I didn’t know it would be this one when I fucking asked you here!”

She looked back around, her nerves calmed a little when she heard that nobody was having a meltdown over the lift being stuck. By the end of the half hour, she had laughed herself into hysterics, aided by their whisky-filled dessert and the cider he had given her. He didn’t give her the opportunity to spiral into a panic attack; she managed to stay calm because he stayed calm. It was something she definitely had never encountered before.

“‘I want an orgasm,’” she recited through her fit of giggles. In her moment of failing to pay attention, she spilled cider onto Malcolm’s shirt. “Sorry!” she said loudly. “Shit! Sorry!”

“It’s fine,” he laughed. “Don’t worry about it.”

This, sitting here watching some bizarre Scottish sitcom where everyone was playing a character thirty or forty years their senior, was so much better than being stuck in that pub with her twat of a husband. She noticed now that she was leaning into his arm, and that he was allowing it.

When he did get up, he stripped his cider-stained shirt off and pulled a sweater off the drying rack in the corner of the room. When she caught herself appreciating the slender line of his torso, she got to her feet and turned her back on him. His body wasn’t something she wanted to see, for the very good reason that it was something she would like to see more of. “Nicola?” he asked her. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Just giving you privacy.”

“If I was that fucking bothered about privacy, I’d have left the room,” he reminded her. She felt his fingers run through her hair as she turned to face him once more. “You’ve still got that fucking cream in your hair,” he informed her. His smile was halfway between disdainful and appreciative. “Christ, you’re a daft woman.”

He took her hand and they sat back down and, for almost an hour, they sat like the biggest pair of slobs, drinking cider and whisky, and eating Scottish junk food. The screen took them to Edinburgh, where crowds lined the Royal Mile, gathered in Princes Street Gardens, and surrounded the castle. “That’s a lot of people,” she observed. “I mean, I know it’s a big thing and it’s the capital of Scotland, but it’s more people than I thought there’d be.”

“Oh, you’ve lived a fucking sheltered life, Nicola Murray,” he chuckled. “Haven’t you ever left Middle England?”

“Not really,” she confessed. He took her by the hand, stood both of them up and turned the volume of the television up.

“Five,” Jackie Bird’s voice came from the television. “Four. Three. Two. One.”

Mons Meg fired. Fireworks popped. Crowds cheered. The drums trilled and the bagpipes played, their tune shifting suddenly from slow and sombre to fast and energetic…and she kissed him. Not a chaste, innocent kiss, either. She dragged him towards her, bending backwards as their bodies pressed together and his hand got lost in her hair. She didn’t know what had come over her, and she didn’t give a single fuck. “ _Should auld acquaintance be forgot_ ,” he sang to her, taking her hands into his as his voice joined the crowd on the TV. “ _And never brought tae mind. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne_.”

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear_ ,” she joined him, “ _for auld lang syne. We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne_.”

“Very fucking English,” he laughed.

She suspected it was the first time in his adult life that he didn’t finish singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at New Year. As the television finished the tradition for them, he pressed his lips to hers. If his touch while cleaning her up had sent those tiny, tingling electric charges into her skin, this was like sticking a knife into a live plug socket. She had forgotten what it was to be swept away in a kiss, to feel like she was the only woman on Earth that mattered in that moment.

They kissed like they’d never known any different, and she wished they never had. This was something she had never experienced with her husband – that softness that somehow managed to send a surge through her body.

She was about to cheat on her husband. She didn’t care. It was all-consuming, this realisation that a man with whom she had done nothing but lock horns was a real man with flesh and blood and heart; perhaps it was terrible of her to want him more than she wanted her own husband, but she couldn’t help it.

By the time they had stumbled into the bedroom and her dress fell to the floor, the decision was made. Maybe it had been made the moment she phoned him from that abomination of a party. She discovered that his intensity wasn’t limited to his speech and his demeanour; it seeped into how he kissed her, how he held her, how he touched her. He leaned over her and whispered into her ear, “Do you still want an orgasm?”

She couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing, and dragged him down to kiss him. “What the fuck do you think?”


End file.
